


Iris Blue, Lily Gleam

by thescyfychannel



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Platonic Cuddling, water garden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 11:56:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18468469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/pseuds/thescyfychannel
Summary: If you can't find a sanctuary, build your own.





	Iris Blue, Lily Gleam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Leticheecopae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leticheecopae/gifts).



> from the fish server's miniswap! prompts:
> 
> 1). Story about them having a water flower garden; like things similar to lotus and the like, hidden away somewhere off the coast so that the plants don't die to sea water.   
> 2). Their lusus doing something very sweet for them/lusus snuggles after a hard day.

You're not very good at running away. This is something you learn after the first time you try it when you're four sweeps and miserable and you end up in a little grotto, just along the coastline. When you follow it all the way out and up, you find the most beautiful place you've ever seen.

Once upon a time, you learned the word _sanctuary_ , and it rang through your mind like the holiest of things. This is the first time you use it, and the first time you think you mean it, looking around the little place, a spring-fed pond bubbling up, sheltered—at its very fringes, no heavy shade to trap things deeper in—by trees and growing things, looking like all the loveliness you'd like to keep close to your soul.

Behind you, though—you're not sure how long you've been standing here, how long this place held your attention—you hear the neigh of your lusus, already come to find you. "I'll be back," you whisper to the sanctuary, your new secret space, and turn to fly your lusus home.

 

You're not very good at running away, but you quickly learn that your lusus will assume it's different if you take him along with you—so you do. You're not all that bothered that he knows another of your secrets, and it turns out that he knows even more about the freshwater plants that best fit this space than you do. You start by learning them, one by one, how they connect and protect and build upon each other—

And then you start making your own changes, considering what such a place might need, what it should hold. Your lusus sees it as a learning opportunity, you see it as another way to thank your sanctuary for existing, or return a little of the good it's done. Either way, the work gets done. Between the two of you, the place quickly becomes a _real_  water garden, a thing of wonder all on its own, and you return often, with and without your lusus.

 

As you grow older your lusus seems less and less concerned with you wandering too far afield, and you visit the garden more often. Visiting with him means help tending the plants and quality time spent together, visiting on your own means moments of quiet peace and meditation that you sometimes found yourself sorely in need of.

Finding a quiet place within yourself had grown harder with each passing night—you had _so much_  to worry about, pollution, dirty landdwellers, the prospect of trying to establish your own place in a cruel and ever-changing Empire—and you only seemed to find your quiet spaces between heartbeats of a trigger pull, or in the little water garden you had made.

 

Eventually, it became your sanctuary in more than name: now you used the word because you truly understood it, because it truly fit this place that had so quickly become your second home. It became the place you stayed, the place that settled you down, the place you ran to when nothing else felt right with the world.

Eventually, it became one of the first places your lusus would check when everything had gone wrong, and he was worried that you were alone and miserable, that something had happened he couldn't so easily repair with soft whickers and a quiet presence.

Which is, eventually, how you ended up here: sitting before the pond, staring down into the depths of your reflection, feeling your eyes fill up with salt water that you didn't want to let flow, alone but for the sighing of the breeze through the trees, alone with your own thoughts and worries and fears and hopes—

Which is where your lusus finds you, wrapped up in yourself and everything you've lost, alone and hurting more than you'd first known. And because he's your lusus, and therefore the best at what he does, he doesn't push, doesn't try to make you come home—instead, he curls up around you, his tail draped across your knees as he leans into your side.

The two of you stay in your sanctuary, just as long as you want—exactly as long as you need.

**Author's Note:**

> a BELATED happy 4/13! meant to be one of the 13 updates for homestuck day but things caught up with me a little


End file.
